Dialogicity and Performativity: The Theatralization of Cultural Media in Early Modern England
The notion of early modern English culture as a culture of performativity is being supported by the importance of the theatre – the theatre of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson – in this period. Within a few decades after its inception, the theatre turned into the leading medium of Elizabethan culture. As the New Historicism has emphasised, it can be regarded as a symbolisation of the pervasive theatricality of early modern representations of power. The theatre had a stake in political power, providing it with a semiotics of (self-) representation, while simultaneously subverting it by exposing the performance character of performance. Drawing on these premises, this project will extend its investigation to other genres and media, such as poetry and epic, dialogue and monologue, cartography and chorography, the anatomical theatre and the dance of death, homilies and historiography, to look at the ways in which these cultural forms and practices share in the dialogic and performative qualities of the theatre, and to highlight their function within courtly, ecclesiastic or academic representations of authority.
Each sub-project is situated within its own research context and has its own specific aims and methods. But all sub-projects share basic assumptions concerning the concept of 'performativity': (1) ‘Performance' in the sense of generative linguistics as processive and creative actualisation of competence; (2) in the sense of speech-act-theory as doing things with words; (3) in the anthropological sense as having affinities to rituals and ceremonies; (4) aesthetically, in the sense of theatrical performances, as mise-en-scène, thereby foregrounding the surplus of meaning produced by the presence of performing bodies; (5) in the technologically and economically defined sense - equally valid in early modern court contexts - of achievement in competitions.
All sub-projects aim at defining the surplus of meaning gained by focussing on the dynamic process character and the materiality of the body in various modes of representation. Performance always involves the embodiment of language and the fashioning and display of the body and its affects. The projects thus share the anthropological focus on how early modern distinctions of race, rank/estate and gender are inscribed in, and performed by, the body.
SUB-PROJECT 1, Dr. Ute Berns: Performative Figurations of Interiority in Early Modern Culture.
In Britain, the Early Modern period witnessed the increasing dissemination of the topic of 'interiority' or 'inwardness' in various discourses and institutions. Concentrating first on drama and then moving on to other genres, this project is devoted to analysing the significance of performativity for the representational production of Early Modern interiority. A performative approach permits us to view interiority not as a simple given, but as the ever-changing result of a process in which the boundaries between the inner and the outer are continually being (re)negotiated. Thus we must ask how concrete performative figurations help to constitute the structures of inwardness, especially at a time when this inwardness is an object in the making, emerging from the interaction of medical, religious and other discourses in conjunction with social and aesthetic practices. In contrast to previous studies focussing primarily on the discursive production of the concept of interiority, this project will explore a number of basic performative patterns, amongst them the type of bodily interiority staged in the theatre of anatomy, and its complement, the skeleton as surface in the Dance of Death. The analysis will centre on the question of how these performative patterns are transformed into performative figurations in dramatic and narrative texts where the notion of interiority is constituted and shaped in contexts of power and knowledge. Special attention will be paid to the stage monologue as it develops into an inward dialogue. The central aim of this project is to achieve, through focussing on performative figurations, a structural differentiation and broadening of the concept of Early Modern interiority as a central aspect of Early Modern subjectivity - through and against which, incidentally, two centuries later Romantic subjectivity took shape.
SUB-PROJECT 2, Dr. Ralf Hertel: "Staging England: Nation and the art of theatre in the Elizabethan age"
This study analyses how cartographic, pictorial, literary, and particularly theatrical representations of England contribute to the emergent national self-awareness in 16th century England. On the one hand, it focuses on the role gender stereotypes play in the formation of national identity. Shakespeare‘s history plays, for instance, show strategies of characterising England in terms of a cultivated masculinity while other countries are portrayed in terms either of a primitive masculine animality or the feminine. In contrast, pictorial representations often depict England as feminine. How are these conflicting strategies of gendering to be interpreted and how do they affect the nation-building process? On the other hand, this project studies how history seems to gradually become animated in the Elizabethan age. In a pragmatic but often somewhat lifeless way, early historiography confronts the reader with dry descriptions of exemplary historical model behaviour or warning examples. Later chronicles, however, are characterised by a style both more literary and more vivid, and history plays such as those by Shakespeare breathe even more live into English history, turning it into the animated play of flesh-and-blood actors. How, then, does the mise-en-scène of the nation in its spatial and historical dimension affect the audience‘s concept of Englishness?
This project analyses the motivation for, and the strategies of, staging England. Thus, it maps out the potentials and limits of theatrical historiography while simultaneously examining the effects that performing England has on the emergent national self-awareness.
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